Wide Atlantic Weird: The Legend Of The Inisfola Broadcast

Wide Atlantic Weird is an on-going collection of stories that attempt to create that feeling you get when you come across a delicious little fragment of weirdness, a story that's so out-there it can't possibly be true, yet one which you can't dismiss out of hand. When you stumble across such a tale buried in a chapter of an old collection of 'unexplained' stories, or when you hear an unbelievable story from a listener to a podcast, that's Wide Atlantic Weird.

Source: Strange World, B.W. Bourke, 1995

Though Ireland was neutral during World War 2, the Irish government maintained a radio outpost off the coast of Kerry in order to monitor both Allied and Axis military radio chatter. The location of this facility was Inisfola Island, about fifty miles off the Deargalagh peninsula. A radio tower was built, as well as several maintenance and residential buildings, and the facility was staffed by Irish Army officers who were formerly stationed at the Curragh, where both British and German POWs were held, so they themselves were fluent in German. During their three years of operation, they recorded no definite evidence of military activities that threatened to breach Irish neutrality. However, in January 1945, they received a transmission that remains unexplained to this day.

At five minutes to midnight, January 2^nd , their instruments picked up a faint broadcast. There was a lot of static, but the officers recognised the language being spoken as German. They scrambled to transcribe the narration, which appeared to be that of a German officer named Koch, who was leading some sort of overground expedition. This seems remarkable, as the Inisfola receiving devices has a range of only a few hundred miles, and so were used to picking up radio broadcasts from aircraft buzzing the Atlantic, the Irish Sea or the English channel. By 1945, with the way the war was going, it seemed extremely unlikely that any German land expedition was making its way over Irish, British, or northern European territory. Besides, the details didn’t match – Koch spoke frequently about the challenges of passing through ‘jungle’ and seemed concerned with avoiding local wildlife, ‘lizards’ in particular. Where was this phantom expedition? The coordinates Koch occasionally provided made no sense either; they seemed to imply that the group was travelling over a concave surface, rather than a convex surface, as when we move across the surface of the earth.

According to Kavanagh, one of the army language specialists, some of the transcript read as follows:

Koch Report, Day 62:

‘The men have been almost driven crazy. Over sixty days travelling in this place. The trail is years old, now overgrown, and the jungle is reclaiming its own. Strange growths, rainbow-coloured, creep across our path. Their branches wriggle, and some of them bite. Doctor Hinter has a gash on his leg that will not heal; his encounter with the creature may yet prove fatal… Everywhere we hear the buzz of unknown insects and the distant roar of the lizards. Until today, I had despaired that we would ever make it. I thought us lost. We had all but lost faith in the compass; the coordinates we reported to you were guesswork. Nothing works as you’d expect down here. Up isn’t up and north isn’t north. The light, too, is so strange: the sun never sets, and too many sleepless nights in this endless twilight have taken their toll on the men. And to look ahead and see the forest and mountains rise into the very air – it’s almost too much to tolerate.

This morning we reached Stanleystadt. The men were relieved to see its radio tower peeking above the jungle, in a valley surrounded by terraced fields: the hand of man visible at last in this savage wilderness. I made a full report to acting Commander Schultz, then had my team sent to the hospital to recooperate. We are to be put up in the bunks on the military side of Stanleystadt. The settlement has grown noticeably since the last reports were made. The depredations of the lizards have lately been less of a problem. A vast bamboo fence has been constructed around the town. Tell Himmler –‘

At which point the report became corrupted by static, then the sound faded entirely. Kavanagh’s complete transcript was sent to the G2 office of the War department in Dublin. There, it appears to have been shelved, and was seemingly lost by the end of the war. The only information relating to the Inisfola broadcast comes from rumours leaked from G2, and the fragment revealed by Kavanagh himself.

Given that the Nazis capitulated shortly after the supposed broadcast took place, it’s tempting to wonder if this subterranean outpost was left stranded, cut off from its parent nation on the surface of the earth. Or, if the suspicions of conspiracy theorists are true, whether the later sightings of UFOs from 1947 on are evidence that this inner society instead thrived, using advanced technology to visit us and fill our skies with more mystery.

-END OF EXTRACT (Strange World, BW Bourke, 1995)